Wittig: poet and radical lesbian

Monique Wittig, born in 1935, passed all her childhood and part of her life of adult to France and lives since a score of years in the United States where she teaches the French literature (at the university of Tucson, in Arizona). She has twenty-nine years when in 1964 she publishes in the editions of Midnight its first novel, an autobiography of childhood to the third nobody who makes a new use of the indefinite pronoun “one”. Devoted by the Médicis price, Opoponax is accomodated with enthusiasm by Claude Simon, by Nathalie Sarraute in France, Mary Mac Carthy in the United States. Marguerite Duras sees there “the capital execution of ninety percent of the books which were made on childhood” 1.

Always prompt to recognize its debt towards the “new novelists”, of which she declares readily that “they are [them] writers which [him] learned [its] trade” 2, Wittig, as Jean Duffy notices it, separates however New Novel as for the question from the engagement3, not which she can be regarded as a “engaged writer”, she who does not cease repeating that the writer deals with literary forms and linguistics and not with social categories, but because, convinced that there is a permeability of reality to the language, she works to transform a semantic system that, well far from accepting like such, it looks with distrust.

In 1969, Wittig writes Guérillères and engages passionately in the movement of the women. It belongs to the first not-mixed group made up at the following day of May 684. At the sides, inter alia, of Christiane Rochefort, Anne Zelenski, Christine Delphy, it is among some expressing which deposit a sheaf for the woman of the unknown soldier, on August 26 19705. The blossoming of female plural in this second book, governed by the pronoun “they”, is obviously related so that the author regards as a turning of his life.

In 1978, Wittig approaches the very new feminist Questions review whose radical “feminist” position is clearly asserted. The publication in the second number in February of a news, “One Day, my prince will come”, then the entry in the collective of drafting in November indicate that Wittig shares with the writers of the revue6 the conviction that the kind is an ideological construction whose function is to camouflage and to authorize the oppression of a sex by the other. But radical opposition of the author of Opoponax to any theory of the kind, with any exploration of the female one, wasn't it what was to feed its too famous conflict with Antoinette Fouque7?

In 1978, following the example American Jill Jonhston, Wittig affirms in “the thought straight” - communicated orally, in New York, published in French two years later - that the lesbians are not women: “It is unsuitable to say that the lesbians live, join, make love with women because “woman” has direction only in the systems of thought and the economic systems heterosexuals. The lesbians are not women” 8. Conceiving the lesbianism like a mode of resistance to a system, like an policy option, Wittig joined the position of the group of the “radical lesbians”, born in Jussieu in 1980. Several members of the collective of drafting of feminist Questions also approach this group, which causes the dissolution of the collective.

Much more recognized today in the United States that in France, Wittig particularly arouses the interest of the intellectuel/le/s close to the Queer thought. Judith Butler9 in particular devotes most of Gender Trouble to a critical analysis of the thought wittigienne, but the almost exclusive interest that it grants to the political tests with the detriment of the literary texts - remarkably read on the other hand by Leah Hewitt10 -, does not enable him to fully return justice to the deeply revolutionary work of that which is before a whole poet.

Femininity is a dressing-up

Traversing following the example Dante the circles of the hell, “Wittig”, guided not by Virgile but by Manastabal, assists, impotent and the tied stomach, with two “parades”, long processions of damnées hearts exhibant their low-necked dresses and their short skirts, their elevated heels and their connected wrists, their feet or their lips atrophied, the ablation of their sexes or the deformation of their bellies. Wittig exhibe thus marks of a féminitude which, for it as for Beauvoir, does not have other reality only its social definition.

The framework of these two processions which take seat - the evocation of the buildings, the sea and the hills attests it - in San Francisco, and the use of the word “parades” rather than of a French synonym more running, make of it a allusion11 in traditional “the Halloween parades” of the Californian capital. This parallel between a carnival and two reviews of what makes the Woman here and there, repeat, like Wittig says it ailleurs12, which femininity is a dressing-up, an atrocious dressing-up without desire, without ludic dimension.

Such of the uniforms, clothing of damnées of the hell heterosexual announce their function: “As soon as raised feet, naked legs and thighs, just as dress and handbag are seen, the unit indicates game.” (Virgile, not: 41). They ensure “containment symbolic system” 13, because they force gestures and movements, imposing ridiculous postures: “If they make fall something, they bend down side, tightened thighs, arms stuck to the body, forming a kind of accordion, to no purpose besides because at a given time they end up showing their breeches.” (Virgile, not: 55). Their counterfeited bodies, reduced, amputees, who are not any more that the sign of their control, the damnées hearts are dispossessed with the profit of the myth of the Woman. Tended in a constant effort to conform to an image, just like Tchiches14 which applies to maigrir15, they are erased, are crushed against the walls when “an individual passes”, etic - the female one, let us know we it, is small - until losing the third dimension: “The world in which they live is with two dimensions. I compare it to the world of the charts to be played…” (Virgile, not: 58).

Surfaces badly differentiated from/to each other, all relating to the Woman, “set up, made up in an essential difference” (Guérillères: 146), “they are captive of the mirror” (Guérillères: 40), of the phallic Direction, their body which cannot be perceived and named differently than like signs univocal sexual difference. Echo more than Narcisse, “reflection of the man” said holy Paul, they are invisible. Their body, single index of their individuation, is unperceivable, it neither is made up, neither disguised, nor masked, but becomes “monstrous mask of itself” 16, invisible if not relative with its conformity with the female model. “Wittig” to prove with some damnées hostile that “its intentions are peaceful” and that its body is in a banal manner similar to their, is stripped with the right in the middle of a laundry: “As no word seems to be able to reach their comprehension, I put myself at hair between two lines of washing machines and I advance among them, not such Venus left water, nor even such as my mother made me, but finally with two shoulders, a chest, a belly, legs and the remainder” (Virgile, not: 16).

She does not manage however more to show herself to be made hear. Its naked body, as the reference to Venus suggests it, is masked by the traditional representations of the female body. Whereas heroin knows that it does not have “anything special with exhiber”, its body of woman does not seem in conformity with the Woman. It is perceived as a threat by the customers of the laundry who shout with the rape, it changes, wrapped by the stereotypes with which the speech dominating equips the homosexual ones. “Wittig”, in this humorous scene, is seen soon covered of hairs and is pleased some, the hairs then make place with scales, its clitoris finally lengthens: “(Look at, it is long like a long finger. Cut it, cut to it)” (Virgile, not: 18).

Lesbians color

In Virgile, not, as under what Wittig calls elsewhere “the mode heterosexual” 17, the alternative “offered” to the women is to accept, renonçant with the position of subject, the subsumation of their bodies to single meaning phallic of which it is “Different the” necessary one, or to take their legs with their neck, to flee the hell for the limbs, an intermediate place between hell and paradise, place narrow, precarious, where one does not have “anything to puff out” (Virgile, not: 107), but where one can refuse to be a woman, i.e. to have the air of it. Muscular, shaven, tattooed, leather vêtues, the hearts of the limbs adopt an appearance which makes them recognize like lesbians: “There are those which go the shaven head with to the face engraved the kind of threat which they are. There are those which advance the girded black leather shoulders…” (Virgile, not: 45). Energetic bicepses, thickness and gestures announce that just as “the lesbians are not women” 18, living them of the limbs are not - or more - damnées hearts. Their martial pace points out that of proud Guérillères: “Of the army of Sporphyre it is known as that it advances like Koo, superb, wild, overlapping a tiger, beautiful face” (Guérillères: 171).

But there mislead us not completely, lesbians of Virgile, not, which carry out guerrilla of survival, without project, which is pavanent around billiards, which flirtent by sirotant their tequila, do not have the scale of Guérillères. “Contrary to fighting of Guérillères, they are not aware of the dangers of narcissism, nor of the sterility of the aggressions which they make against particular men, whereas the true enemy is the difference” 19. Thus, in Virgile, not, Monique Wittig denounces it, though with humour and tenderness, the opposition to progress of the community lesbian. An opposition to progress which the conformism of appearances reveals. In comparison, Guérillères, committed in a total revolution, adopt with a great freedom and a deep direction of the play, clothing, postures, make-up whose diversity supposes a constant attempt at invention of oneself. Sometimes they paint their figures and their legs of bright colors (Guérillères: 147), sometimes they cover their faces of a brilliant powder (G: 143), sometimes they enclose their hair in a silk band, sometimes they drop their black hair to be held and on their shoulders, and agitate them “as the bacchantes which like to make move their thyrses” (G: 132). They wear blue and red clothing (G: 132), or a black tunic, a mask and a club (G: 201), sometimes they fights in futuristic behaviours: “They wear clothing very of a part, facts of a metal species. Their figures, that the spheres with ray light intermittently, resemble famous persons of insects with antennas and eyes stalks” (G: 155). Already takes shape the bodies in change of the amantes Body lesbian, gigantic, monstrous, equipped with ten thousand eyes or thousands of arm, bodies plethoric, resulting from the explosion of the univocal female body, but body also which can take form only in this “privileged field” 20 that the literature constitutes.

Body in glares

Let us think of the small Catherine Legrand, so badly at ease in its trousers: “One does not put trousers when one is a little girl. That is not liked because one becomes two. […] Perhaps that Catherine Legrand is the only little girl to carry trousers and not to be not exactly a little girl” (Opoponax: 19).

In the yoke of the social universe, being a little girl who is not exactly a little girl, it is to physically feel it Malayan of a division, the trousers of Catherine Legrand sticks, “between the legs, the seam that prevents it from going”. It is not its clothing which one sees as he imprisons it, but the writing of the desire, the practice of the quotation, the meeting of the “Other” which will allow the little girl, stating in its turn of the sentences written elsewhere by Baudelaire and Scève, to reach this beyond the sexes without which, according to Wittig, it would not know to have subjectivity there.

The literature is the only place from where the semantic system and leaving the structures of thought and the practices perception can lose their obvious character. Treating the body - corpus - lesbian as the language which she wants to tear off with univocity that imposed to him the former uses, Wittig splits up it, peels it, disintegrates it, and recomposes it without end, until released of the female gangue, or the hétérosexuelle reading, it bursts, open to infinite changes, releasing a not duelle but plural subjectivity, well beyond the binary model of the sexual kind.

By the writing, Wittig transgresses, upsets and exceeds the question of the sexual identity. It operates an inversion of the grammatical kind, “linguistic index of the political opposition between the sexes” 21, that is to say which it feminizes the divine and paternal figures of Zeus (the Body lesbian: 39) or of God of the Christians (the Body lesbian: 165), that is to say that it affixes in the name of Sappho a male substantive such as “our large predecessor” (Virgile, not: 16), or that it founds a monosexué world where the female one alternating with no masculine loses any particularizing or sexuant character.

Texts poetic of Wittig, well far from to be simple illustration from the point of view that it defended in theoretical tests - which are often posterior besides for them -, reveal the fertility and the new character of its design of the subject. Digging, sentence after sentence, and word for word, the relation between unnamed and language, they tear off the thought of the difference to valorization of the féminin22, break to it parallel instinctual/symbolic system, female/male, and by doing this allow the emergence of a subjectivity which tightens with the obliteration of the kinds, without turning over, like the reading of the political tests the fact of accepting Judith Butler, the monolithic subject of the thought humaniste23.

In the Body lesbian, which announces as of the first phrases its project of rupture with the female one (“In this géhenne gilded adored black bid your farewell m/a very beautiful […] so that they name the affection tenderness or the gracious abandonment” (the Body lesbian: 7), the bodies of both amantes are unceasingly cut up, peeled, devoured and are the object of the most various metamorphoses, they are liquified, petrified, extend or reduced. Through a long enumeration in bold characters, moods, internal organs, bones… which alternates with the fragments poetic, and echoed the many scenes of dismemberment, the female body, become unrecognizable, is literally pulverized. Magic of poetry wittigienne, as notices it Teresa de Lauretis “transcends the sex as well as the sexual kind and recreates the body differently: with the risk that it is monstrous, grotesque, mortal,…” 24 violate. If there are not “appropriation and redeployment of the sexual categories” 25, there is on the other hand a perpetual redeployment of the oppositions enters named and unnamable, between private individual and general, a constant passage of the single statute of speaker, sitting “in a bright situation if it were but morose” (the Body lesbian: 165), with that of “I” disconcerted, threatened, wishing, wished, cleaved, but finally prone. Bodies constantly in change of both amantes of the Body lesbian as the variety of the erotic positions that they adopt, sometimes swallowed and penetrated, infiltrated and liquified, rides or adulated, serve working of a burst subject, bright.

By moving the question of the dressing-up, of the metamorphosis of the bodies, in the literary field, Wittig opens a space where the passage of an appearance with another, like the fundamental relation between I and you, are named, put in scene independently of any reference to the sexuation. In the Body lesbian, “daydream about the beautiful analysis of the pronouns “I” and “you” by the linguist Benveniste” 26, the interlocution seems a requirement with the emergence of a subjectivity, but if speaker and interlocutress, amante and liked constitute one by the other, exploring until the pleasure the reversibility of the positions of “I” and of “you”, they are not identifiable at all one with the other. The absence of the interlocutress, her ferocity are sometimes highly felt and in this search of subjectivity, that which speaks feels threatened by the “other”: “j/e make burst the small units of m/on me, j/e am threatened, j/e am wished by you” (the Body lesbian: 109).

Threatened to lose itself in the “other”? Threatened to be separate about it? The whole of the fragments tells the passage which operate the amantes separation with fusion, of I with you, you with me. The conquest of a subjectivity is done through this movement of the One with the Other which is practical subject, which fulfills the same function as the passage from one sex to another in the texts of Cixous. Thus this daydream starting from the pronouns I and you are prolonged it until the advent of the “other” of the same sex, i.e. also prone. Advent which carries a decisive blow to the sexual opposition set up by the psychoanalysis out of pivot of the report/ratio to the language, because between one and the Other, Zeina and Ganymedea the wine waiter, between Artémis and Sappho, it is not that which differs, it is not that which makes direction.

Peppered with quotations and rich person of borrowed characters, the writing of Wittig pastiche, parody, more often disguises the former texts than the sexuées representations. When the speaker of the Body lesbian pronounces the words of Christ or that the guérillères adopt the heroic postures of the heroes of Iliade, the myth of the sexuée identity as the claim with the universality of the male subject are erased with the profit of a subject which is unaware of the sexual difference while exhibant the dialogical character in its speech. Through the dressing-up of the secular speech, repeated but transformed by the lesbian point of view of, the minority subject manages to circumvent a language which reduces it to silence.

Bibliography

Appendices

Notes

Catherine ROGNON-ECARNOT

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